How to Improve Your Customer Value and Make More Money

This article will teach you how to increase your average customer value and make more money for your service business. The calculator is at the bottom of the article.

Improve Your Customer Value and Make More Money

This article is going to present to you one of the strategies we highly recommend to home service professionals to help increase revenue and offset marketing costs.

The strategy is called cross-selling…

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    What is Cross-Selling?

    Cross-selling is the action of selling additional products or services to an existing customer.

    When people think of cross-selling, they think of companies like McDonald’s (Do you want fries with that?) and Gas Stations (Would you like to add a car wash to your purchase?), and even the cell phone companies (Want to add an extra line for your teenager for only $20 / month?!).

    Step-by-Step Guide: How to Use Our Customer Value Optimization Calculator

    This section will give you step-by-step details on how to use our Customer Value Optimization calculator. Your goal is to get your technicians selling enough add-on services to generate enough revenue to cover his/her marketing expenses. Our calculator will help you do that.

    watch video instructions

    Step 1: Determine Your Marketing Costs Per Technician

    Before you get started, you’ll need to gather a few pieces of information. 

    You’ll need to know how much you currently spend on marketing per monthDon’t forget to include fees from your marketing agency, Google & Bing Ad spend, Angie’s List Ads, Yellow Page Ads, Yelp Ads, etc.

    If you keep your accounting records up-to-date, you should see this number on your profit & loss statement under Marketing or Advertising Expenses.

    Enter your data into the yellow fields below. The calculator will automatically calculate how much you spend per technician each month for marketing.

    Service Area Marketing for Home Service Pros

    Step 2: Create Add-on Services

    Now you need to create a menu of products or services to cross-sells.

    Think it through for a while. How will you Super Size your service?

    Some add-on services to consider include: 

    • Washer & Dishwasher Disinfecting/Cleaning Service
    • Dryer Vent Cleaning (Remove dirt & germs + harmful lint)
    • Dryer housing cleaning (unit only)
    • Refrigerator Coil Cleaning (Remove allergens, bacteria, and harmful debris)
    • Second Appliance Add-ons at a reduced fee.
    • In-house extended service agreement.
    • HVAC tune-up or inspection (Replace dirty filters–really highlight the disinfecting aspect).
    • Refrigerator water filter replacement
    • Annual service agreements or unlimited service calls.

     

    Once you’ve defined your Add-on Services, adjust the Service Fee and Conversion Goal columns until the Monthly Upsell Earnings field is equal to or greater than the Marketing Cost / Lead field.

    Be sure to set goals that are realistic. For example, don’t expect that 50% of your customers will want to buy a dryer vent cleaning service. Your technicians will struggle to meet such an ambitious goal and become discouraged. Shoot for a 15% or less conversion percentage to start.

    Adjust your numbers monthly until you find a winning combination of price point and conversion percentage.

    Step 3 : Review Your Technician Goals

    The calculator will automatically enter the number of times the technician needs to sell each service to meet the conversion goals you set in step 2. If the monthly sales goals seem too difficult, adjust your pricing and conversion percentage in step 2 until you set realistic expectations.

    Step 4: Print Your Monthly Sales Goals

    Once you’ve calculated your sales goals, hit the PRINT PDF button to generate sales goals to share with each technician. (Don’t worry, you don’t have to give us your email)

    Now that you know exactly how many add-on services the technician needs to sell to cover his own marketing costs, you can easily create incentive plans for technicians who sell more than you require because you know exactly how much it costs you to keep his schedule full.

    Technician Cross-Sell Calculator

    Note: This calculator works best on a desktop computer, laptop, or tablet.

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